Boston Journal; Could You Please Hold for a Minute? The Governor Is About to Give Birth

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Acting Gov. Jane M. Swift, who is about to make American history by giving birth while in office, to twins no less, appears to be going through a rare late-pregnancy complication, Massachusetts politics.

Ms. Swift was confined to hospital bed-rest on Tuesday because she was having contractions every six to eight minutes. On Wednesday, in keeping with her plan to use technology to keep on top of affairs of state as much as possible, she sought to run a State House meeting of her advisory Governor's Council by speakerphone.

But some members of the council, whose eight members are Democrats, questioned whether it was constitutional for the governor, who is a Republican, to run the meeting without being present, and though the meeting went ahead, a majority voted to ask the state's highest court for its opinion.

Republicans cried foul. And Ms. Swift's plans to combine the running of a state of more than 6 million residents with the imminent delivery of twins became, once again, a topic for statewide coverage and discussion.

At a news conference today at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where Ms. Swift is being monitored, her spokesman, Jason Kauppi, took questions like: Why doesn't the governor just take a few days off? What difference would it really make if the secretary of state took over for a bit? And even: Can someone who may soon be anesthetized from the waist down for a Caesarean section be considered competent to run the state at that point?

Mr. Kauppi's answers were simple enough. Ms. Swift, who took over last month when the former governor, Paul Cellucci, became ambassador to Canada, feels an obligation to the voters to work as long and hard as she can, he said.

''She would not describe this as the optimal situation,'' Mr. Kauppi said. But, ''If she can continue her job, she will.'' And at this point, he said, she can.

Ms. Swift's contractions do not constitute labor but indicate that labor will start within days, her doctor said. She is signing papers, taking phone calls and meeting with aides, but has stopped public appearances and fund-raising. She said that after the babies were born she would take an eight-week ''working maternity leave,'' during which she would continue some work while out of the public eye in her Williamstown, Mass., home in the western corner of the state.

The speakerphone squabble prompted accusations of political gamesmanship in part because Ms. Swift is surrounded by potential rivals for her new office in next year's election. The council member who most objected to the use of the speakerphone, Edward O'Brien, is the father of the state treasurer, Shannon O'Brien, who is considered likely to be a contender for governor.

(Ms. O'Brien disagreed with her father today, saying Ms. Swift should be accommodated in all possible ways.)

Secretary of State William Galvin is also expected to run for governor. Mr. Galvin's spokesman, Brian McNiff, said Mr. Galvin had proposed moving the meeting of the governor's council, an elected board, to Ms. Swift's hospital room to remove any question about its constitutionality.

''It was not an attempt to make life difficult,'' Mr. McNiff said. ''She's in the hospital and the council would have been there in front of her.''

Mr. O'Brien, having had a taste of what it means to step into a hot gender issue, emphasized today that he had empathy for Ms. Swift; one of his daughters recently bore twins, he said. But, ''It makes no difference who the governor is, what the gender is or what the malady is; the question is one of capacity or incapacity,'' and whether the governor needs to be present at council meetings, he said.

Some council members saw it differently. One, Mary Ellen Manning of Peabody, was reported to complain at the meeting that the treatment of the governor was ''antifamily, antifemale and antiworker.''

Mr. Kauppi said Ms. Swift understood that the speakerphone issue had arisen from legitimate differences of opinion.

There is speculation that such seeming hardball politics played against a woman on the verge of giving birth may help Ms. Swift in the polls.

She is already on the upswing. Ms. Swift, who had faced fire for ethical lapses that had included asking aides to baby-sit for her daughter, was once mired at less than 20 percent in voter approval ratings. But she had the approval of 41 percent of voters in a recent Boston Herald poll that asked how they thought she was doing. The 401 voters in the poll were about evenly split on whether they thought that giving birth would hamper Ms. Swift's ability to govern.

On that count, Mr. Kauppi, who has maintained that Ms. Swift can keep running the state through twins or high water, allowed today, ''She may be distracted while she is giving birth.''

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